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WATER POLITICS

Via Politico, a report on the deal that’s shaping the future of the American West:

The future of the American West is quietly being hashed out in the conference rooms of a Las Vegas casino this week. Just across the strip from the Bellagio’s fountains, in the shadow of an enormous Eiffel Tower-knock-off, negotiators from the seven states that share the Colorado River are racing to reach a deal on how to share the West’s most important — and shrinking — waterway.

Climate change has shriveled the river’s flows by more than 20 percent over the past two decades, and the only question now is how much worse things will get.

The negotiations over how to share the pain of bringing water use in line with the shrunken waterway will have huge implications for the 40 million people who rely on it at their taps in metro areas from Denver to Phoenix to San Diego, as well as for the powerhouse farming operations that use roughly three-quarters of the river’s water to irrigate some of the country’s most productive agricultural land. Also on the line are the interests of 30 federally-recognized tribes along the river and the 11 national parks and monuments it courses through, including the Grand Canyon.

The politics present an absolute landmine for the Biden administration, which has taken a much more aggressive approach with the affected states than its predecessors.

The sharpest pain will be centered on the three lower river states: Arizona and Nevada — two crucial political swing states – and California, home of the Democratic Party’s most deep-pocketed donors and whose governor is widely believed to harbor presidential ambitions.

Especially contentious is the fault line between farmers, who typically hold the most protected rights to the river, and the urban areas that are the states’ economic engines and are home to their voting bases, but are first in line for water delivery cuts under the century-old legal regime that governs the river.

“This is going to be the hardest thing that any of us have ever done,” said Jeff Kightlinger, a long-time California water manager who is representing the largest and most powerful farm district in this round of negotiations.

Even before the current megadrought affecting the region, cities, farms and industries from the mountains of Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border were using more water than the river reliably delivered each year. They got by thanks to water stored at the river’s two big reservoirs at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. But that storage has been drained so low that, before last year’s wet winter, water managers feared they could be just a year away from losing the ability to physically get water out of one of the two main dams on the river.

Mother Nature, and a three-state deal to conserve water over the next three years in exchange for $1.2 billion in federal funding, have headed off the disaster for now. But crafting new rules to govern the river through a much drier future beginning in 2026 will be exponentially harder.

For one thing, the gusher of federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled the short-term pact will be gone by then, and there’s no guarantee that new federal dollars will materialize. In fact, there’s already evidence that those dollars are driving up the cost of water conservation deals.

And, while some of the river’s most powerful interests — namely, the Imperial Valley farm district in Southern California that controls more water than the states of Arizona and Nevada, combined — were willing to take some pain in a moment of crisis, they’re under enormous pressure from their constituents not to give up much water going forward.

The upper river states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico are also reluctant. They aren’t using their full water allocations now, but don’t want their ability to tap that water going forward to be stymied by what they see as flagrant overconsumption by their downstream neighbors.

Then there’s Mexico. Under international treaty, the U.S. must deliver a set quantity of water across the border each year. While the Mexican government has agreed to participate in prior drought deals, those agreements are about to expire and it’s unclear what it would take to gain their participation in the pain going forward — especially if former President Donald Trump were to win next November.

That could have something to do with why the Biden administration wants a deal done and the legal process to shore it up well underway by the end of 2024.